AS I came home through the woods with
my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught
a
glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange
thrill of
savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw;
not that
I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once
or
twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the
woods, like
a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of
venison
which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me.
The
wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself,
and still
find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life,
as do
most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I
reverence
them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and
adventure
that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to
take rank
hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have
owed to
this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest
acquaintance with
Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which
otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen,
hunters,
woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods,
in a
peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more
favorable mood
for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or
poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to
exhibit
herself to them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on
the
head waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of
St.
Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at
second-hand and
by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when
science
reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for
that
alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

They mistake who assert that
the Yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public
holidays, and
men and boys do not play so many games as they do in England, for here
the more
primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like
have not
yet given place to the former. Almost every New England boy among my
contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and
fourteen;
and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the
preserves of an
English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage.
No
wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But
already a
change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an
increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest
friend of
the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.

Moreover, when at the pond,
I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually
fished
from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever
humanity I
might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my
philosophy
more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt
differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods.
Not that
I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings
were much
affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As
for
fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that
I was
studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess
that I
am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying
ornithology than
this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds,
that, if
for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet
notwithstanding
the objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if
equally
valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my
friends
have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them
hunt, I
have answered, yes — remembering that it was one of the best
parts of my
education — make them hunters, though sportsmen only at
first, if possible,
mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough
for them
in this or any vegetable wilderness — hunters as well as
fishers of
men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who

"yave not of
the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben
not holy men."

There is a period in the
history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the
"best
men," as the Algonquins called
them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun;
he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.
This was my
answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit,
trusting
that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless
age of
boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the
same
tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I
warn you,
mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic
distinctions.

Such is oftenest the young
man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of
himself. He
goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has
the
seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as
a poet
or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The
mass of
men are still and always young in this respect. In some countries a
hunting
parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's
dog, but
is far from being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to consider
that the
only obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like
business, which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a
whole
half-day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the
town,
with just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that
they
were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string
of fish,
though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. They
might go
there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the
bottom
and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process
would be
going on all the while. The Governor and his Council faintly remember
the pond,
for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too
old and
dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. Yet
even they
expect to go to heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, it is
chiefly to
regulate the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing
about the
hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the
legislature
for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes
through
the hunter stage of development.

I have found repeatedly, of
late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in
self-respect. I have
tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my
fellows, a
certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always
when I
have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I
think
that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first
streaks
of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs
to the
lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman,
though
without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at
all. But
I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted
to
become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something
essentially
unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to see where
housework
commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy
and
respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from
all ill
odors and sights. Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as
well as
the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an
unusually
complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case
was its
uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and
eaten my
fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant
and
unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few
potatoes
would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my
contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea,
or
coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced
to
them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The
repugnance to
animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It
appeared
more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I
never
did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe
that every
man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic
faculties in the
best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal
food, and
from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by
entomologists —
I find it in Kirby and Spence—
that "some insects in their
perfect state,
though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them"; and they
lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all insects in this state
eat
much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when
transformed
into a butterfly ... and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly"
content
themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The
abdomen
under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is
the tidbit
which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the
larva
state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without
fancy or
imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.

It is hard to provide and
cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but
this, I
think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at
the
same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately
need not
make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits.
But put
an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not
worth the
while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught
preparing
with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or
vegetable
food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is
otherwise
we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men
and women.
This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to
ask why
the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied
that it
is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he
can and
does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is
a
miserable way — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or
slaughtering
lambs, may learn — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of
his race who
shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome
diet.
Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of
the
destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off
eating
animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other
when
they came in contact with the more civilized.

If one listens to the
faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly
true, he
sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet
that way,
as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest
assured objection
which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments
and
customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it misled him.
Though
the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the
consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity
to
higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet
them with
joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,
is more
elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.
All nature is your
congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The
greatest
gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to
doubt
if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.
Perhaps the
facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to
man. The
true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and
indescribable as
the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a
segment of
the rainbow which I have clutched.

Yet, for my part, I was
never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a
good
relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long,
for the
same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I
would
fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness.
I
believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so
noble a
liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm
coffee,
or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am
tempted by
them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes
destroyed
Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all
ebriosity, who
does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found
it to be
the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they
compelled
me to eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself
at
present somewhat less particular in these respects. I carry less
religion to
the table, ask no blessing; not because I am wiser than I was, but, I
am
obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with
years I
have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these questions are
entertained
only in youth, as most believe of poetry. My practice is "nowhere,"
my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far from regarding
myself as one of
those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it says, that "he who
has true faith in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that
exists,"
that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it;
and even
in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentatorhas
remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to "the
time of distress."

Who has not sometimes
derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite
had no
share? I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to
the
commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the
palate,
that some berries which I had eaten on a hillside had fed my
genius. "The soul not being mistress of herself," says
Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one
does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one
does not
know the savor of food." He who distinguishes the true savor of his
food
can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puritan
may go
to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman
to his
turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but
the
appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the
quantity,
but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a
viand to
sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the
worms that
possess us. If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and
other such
savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a
calf's foot,
or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the
mill-pond,
she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can
live this
slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.

Our whole life is
startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and
vice.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the
harp
which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which
thrills us.
The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance
Company,
recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment
that we
pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the
universe are
not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.
Listen to
every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is
unfortunate
who does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the
charming
moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard
as
music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.

We are conscious of an
animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature
slumbers. It is
reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the
worms
which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may
withdraw
from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a
certain health
of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked
up the
lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which
suggested that
there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the
spiritual. This
creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "That in
which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a
thing very
inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men
preserve it
carefully." Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained
to
purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to
seek him
forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over the external senses
of
the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in
the
mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time pervade
and
control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in
form is
the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative
energy, which,
when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are
continent
invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what
are
called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits
which
succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is
open. By
turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed
who is
assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine
being
established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account
of the
inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that
we are such
gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts,
the
creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our
disgrace.
—

"How
happy's he who
hath due place assigned
To his beasts and
disafforested his mind!

.
.
. . .
. .

Can use this
horse,
goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass
himself to all the rest!
Else man not only
is
the herd of swine,
But he's those
devils
too which did incline

Them to a
headlong
rage, and made them worse."

All sensuality is one,
though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a
man
eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one
appetite, and
we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how
great a
sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity.
When the
reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at
another. If
you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall
a man
know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this
virtue, but
we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have
heard.
From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and
sensuality. In
the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person
is
universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun
shines on
prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid
uncleanness,
and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable.
Nature is
hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you
are
Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself
no more,
if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion
esteemed
heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him
to new
endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.

I hesitate to say these
things, but it is not because of the subject — I care not how
obscene my words
are — but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my
impurity. We
discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are
silent about
another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the
necessary
functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every
function
was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial
for the
Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He
teaches how to
eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating
what is
mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things
trifles.

Every man is the builder of
a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely
his
own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all
sculptors and
painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any
nobleness
begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality
to
imbrute them.

John Farmer sat at his door
one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running
on his
labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his
intellectual
man. It was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were
apprehending
a frost. He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he
heard
some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood.
Still he
thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though
this kept
running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it
against
his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the
scurf of
his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute
came
home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and
suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They
gently did
away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived.
A voice
said to him — Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling
life, when a
glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over
other
fields than these. — But how to come out of this condition
and actually migrate
thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity,
to let
his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with
ever
increasing respect.